zaterdag 23 augustus 2014

The re-invention of Giambattista Vico

Giambattista
Vico died in poverty in January 1744, having spent his last pennies on a new
edition of the Principj di Scienza Nuova.
Outside Naples, nobody cared. No notices appeared in the learned journals;
no obituaries were read at royal or local academies. Eighty years later, his
work was translated into German and French; in the 1860s, Michelet
retrospectively called him “his sole guiding spirit”,[i]
and a statue was raised in the Naples public gardens. Anthony Grafton’s
foreword to the Penguin edition of the New
Science compares it to Newton’s Principia.[ii] And
so, posthumously, Vico became the founding father he wanted to be. It is a
historical Cinderella story too good to be true.

In fact,
Vico was never quite forgotten. Rather, his 18th-century readers didn’t know what to do with him. No one publicly acknowledged his claim to have founded a ‘new
science’; no one elaborated or refuted his ‘historical proofs’. But he was read. Montesquieu and Goethe owned copies
of the Scienza Nuova; Hamann and
Jacobi discussed him in correspondence; Herder mentions him in the Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität.[iii]Jean Le Clerc, who had favourably
reviewed two earlier works by Vico, was sent a review copy – to no effect.[iv] The
Göttingen writers of compendia, who read everything, knew who he was: he is
included, with compliments for his originality and caveats for his idiosyncrasy,
in Eichhorn’s Geschichte der Litteratur (1805-11)
and Wachler’s Geschichte der historischen
Forschung und Kunst (1802-20). If that is what oblivion is like, then I’d
love to be forgotten like that.

(Oblivion
is rather what happened to Louis de Beaufort, the insightful critic of ancient
Roman sources, and Lambert ten Kate, whose Aenleiding
tot de kennisse van het verhevene deel der Nederduitsche sprake (1723) was
regarded by some later linguists as a precursor to Grimm’s epoch-making Deutsche Grammatik. Both, unlike Vico,
are now only known to specialists.)

Vico is
best described as a 17th century figure who lived in the 18th
century and flourished in the 19th. In his way of reducing history
to principles, de more geometrico, he
is the contemporary of Hobbes and Spinoza rather than Voltaire and Montesquieu.
Introducing your work through a 35-page explanation of the frontispiece was
old-fashioned in 1725 and outdated in 1744. For someone who reputedly founded
the modern humanities, Vico is quite a bit too credulous: he believed that
Hercules had chopped down the woods of Europe and that giants roamed the Earth
before the Flood, who grew so big because they ate their own shit. (That comes
from Tacitus.) The two people outside Italy who seriously referred to Vico as a
secondary source in the 18th century do so in support of a conjectured or
invented mythical past: Michael Denis in his translation of Ossian, and Antoine
Court de Gébelin, the pasigraphic reconstructor of the Wisdom of the Ancients.

Vico’s
current fame largely relies on Michelet’s 1824 translation, which doubled as
one of the great programmatic texts of his generation of historians. But of
course, Michelet did not discover Vico like others discovered the Manessische
Codex or the Beowulf. He worked upon a suggestion from Victor Cousin, then on
his way to become the great French academic mogul of the 1830s and -40s.
Cousin, who is not generally remembered for his originality, probably heard
about Vico while making his 1817 grand tour of German thinkers. By that time,
the name of Vico had begun to buzz round louder.

Joep
Leerssen, in a 2012 article, draws a ‘paper trail’ from Vico via Herder to 19th-century
historicism.[v]
Such a paper trail indeed exists, but the suggestion of an intellectual
genealogy begs the question. In its crudest form, historicism means ‘seeing
things in their own time’. Couldn’t the ‘founders of
historicism’ have come up with the idea regardless of that?Indeed they probably did. The
remarkable fact is that Vico came to be discussed in much more detail after the
publication of Friedrich August Wolf’s Prolegomena
ad Homerum (1795) and Barthold Niebuhr’s Römische Geschichte (1811-2) – moreover, in immediate response to these
works. Lovers of intrigue will say that he was finally revealed as the hidden
source behind so much purportedly revolutionary insight; the more likely
interpretation is that Vico was re-invented together with his insights.

The shift
occurs in two very similar texts from 1807 and 1816, the first by Wolf in the
first issue of Museum der
Altertumswissenschaft, the second a review of Niebuhr’s Römische Geschichte by the Swiss
philologist Johann Caspar von Orelli. Wolf, under the title “Giambattista
Vico über den Homer”,[vi]
summarizes the third book of the Scienza
Nuova, on the “discovery of the true Homer”. In a blurry mix of paraphrase
and comment, Wolf draws up a long list of points on which Vico had new ideas,
made mistakes, or overlapped with his own Prolegomena.
Wolf claims to have been first alerted on Vico by a letter from Cesarotti,
the Italian translator of Ossian and the Iliad,
who saw strong analogies between the Prolegomena
and the Scienza Nuova, and subsequently
sent him a copy.[vii]Wolf’s judgement on Vico is not without
hesitations: “Historische Strenge ist zwar nirgends in diesem Räsonnement; kaum
scheint Vico davon eine Idee gehabt
zu haben. Alles hat eher das Ansehen von Visionen“.[viii]
Also, Vico is not mentioned in Wolf’s Darstellung
der Altertumswissenschaft, which appeared in the same volume. Still he concludes that if Vico had written
in English, he would have been famous.

Orelli
finds Wolf’s judgement still a bit too grudging. Reviewing Niebuhr in the Ergänzungsblätter
zur Jenaischen allgemeinen Literatur-Zeitung(1816 Bd. II, No. 91-2, pp. 337-46), he does
the same with regard to Roman history: pointing out parallels between Vico and
Niebuhr, in a neat list of 16 points, with long Italian quotes. According to
Orelli, Vico’s ideas on Roman history are even more worthwhile than those on
Homer; enough so, Orelli concludes, to warrant a German translation of Vico’s
autobiography and at least part of the Scienza
Nuova. This hint, too, was
taken up: Orelli is thanked abundantly in the preface to Wilhelm Ernst Weber’s
1822 Grundzüge einer neuen Wissenschaft, and
presumably he is also the ‘friend’ mentioned at the beginning of the preface
who admonished Weber to translate it.

Even Orelli
complains about Vico’s “wissenschaftliche Mystik”.[ix]
(Nobody ever doubted that Vico was eccentric; not even Michelet.) What is new
about Wolf’s and Orelli’s reception is that they distill a set of theses from
the Scienza Nuova which can be true
or false; that is, they treat them as candidates
for truth or falsehood rather than something generally ‘inspiring’. They
were, to my best knowledge, the only ones to do so; even Cesarotti never gets
quite specific. Moreover, they could do so only after these had become points of analogy with Niebuhr and the Prolegomena.

Now both
Wolf and Niebuhr very self-consciously styled their works as foundational
texts, with only slightly less chutzpah than Vico; both purport to do away with
the old rubbish and start philology and Roman history anew. And they got away
with it. While the learned world of the early 18th century largely
shrugged about Vico’s bombastic declaration of a New Science, Wolf and Niebuhr
indeed got canonized as the founders of historicism, although the term was not
invented until half a century later. In all probability, neither of them
consulted the long-dead, eccentric Neapolitan professor of rhetoric until after
publication.[x]
To be
reminded of some obscure predecessor must have been a nuisance; but for those
who constructed a canon around Wolf and Niebuhr, it did not do great damage to
their revolutionary rhetoric. After all, if some visionary from
an academic backwater darkly adumbrates your great revolutionary insight, all
the better – it has been foretold! This
is no longer a Cinderella story; this almost gets messianic, with Giambattista Vico
as John the Baptist.

End irony.
Wolf’s and Orelli’s articles serve to show that Vico was not a mere eccentric,
and that he was, in his eccentric way, probably brilliant. But it doesn’t
really matter whether Vico was brilliant. Lots of unsung heroes probably were.
Pointing out parallels doesn’t add significant new information, and it
certainly does not make the publication of the Scienza Nuova, in retrospect, a turning point in the history of
ideas. After the parallels had been pointed out, all that remained to do with
Vico was to praise him, translate him, re-read him, write history about him,
and put him on a pedestal. All that became a candidate for truth-or-falsehood were those parallels. For those that held different opinions about
the origins of the Roman constitution and the historical Homer, they could
better pick their fight with Niebuhr or Wolf, who had access to up-to-date
methods and sources and who could talk back.

There is
indeed a paper trail, but there is nothing mysterious about it. It is not a
trail that goes underground because ‘the time isn’t ripe’ and that gloriously resurfaces in another century. It is rather a
trail that remains on the surface and that suddenly goes up because the terrain
rises, where some of the main roads run dead. And does this make the Scienza Nuova the Principia of the modern humanities? No way, Tony.

[v]Leerssen, “The Rise of Philology: The
Comparative Method, the Historicist Turn and the Surreptitious Influence of
Giambattista Vico” in R. Bod, J. Maat & T. Weststeijn (eds.), The Making of the Humanities. Volume II:
From early modern to modern disciplines (Amsterdam 2012), 23-35.